Mark Leyner Quotes

You're always on duty because you're in a constant state of observation. That's one of the challenges of being a comedian. I think one of the other challenges is that, whether we like it or not, it's a profession that requires failure. It doesn't just encourage failure. It requires it because it's all trial and error. You need to know what doesn't work to know what works.

I love writing stand-up so much and tinkering and looking for ideas.

Stand-up is cool. In stand-up, you get to learn about yourself if you do it from a thoughtful place.

I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.

I don't have any writers. I never get a laugh with somebody else's jokes. I can't do it justice.

Stand-up is an amazing art form, I think, because it's all about you having complete control of the situation, but absolutely none.

For aspiring comedians? Don't listen to me. Just go on stage and do what you think is funny.

Performing comedy, you develop a rhythm of ideas and laughs. I live for it.

Also I can come up with new bits - people yell stuff out and it's a new subject or a subject that I've been thinking about that I haven't done onstage yet and I'll just run with it.

When someone says to me, do you do stand-up I say absolutely not. I like to think of it as a theatrical performance. With me the show changes maybe five to ten percent every night. Of course, whatever I see in front of me and sometimes I get on a little run about it and it changes the show. And my delivery is such that people who have seen me many times say Gee, I never heard that before. Actually, they have, but I might have changed it around.

I think comedy is difficult, and I'm amazed so many people want to do it. I'll be buying jeans and somebody will say, "I'm a comedian" - the guy selling you the jeans. The desire to be a comedian is weird. I found it weird myself to want to be one; I was a schoolboy when I wanted to be one but I didn't know how to do it. That was 50 years ago, so times have changed greatly. There seems to be a long line of people desperate to do it and most of them are quite good.

Stand-up in general is the most raw form of entertainment. There is no pyrotechnics or back-up dancers, it's just live and die by your jokes, that's it.

I am a guy who talks about bacon and escalators. Stand-up comedy is very much a conversation. It's very personal, stylistically.

One of the reasons I still do stand-up is because it was so hard in the beginning that I feel like it would be such a shame not to redeem it that it's all fun.

I've never written jokes. I mean, I'll write things on a piece of paper and riff on them onstage.

When young comedians ask me for advice that's the one thing I always say is if they're improvisers I'm like do improv, don't make that your sole thing. And at the end of the day when you do your best work you also just kinda, by definition flush it down the toilet and never do it again.

A lot of amazing comedians that I've worked with just really follow their instincts and you can't really teach someone comedic timing. And you just kind of have it.

'Where's Bill going?' He's going to comedy death. Boom! He pops out of it with another joke. It's my particular style.

When I used to watch comedians with my dad, he laid it all out for me. He wanted to be a comedian himself, and he was so funny. We'd watch stand-up on TV, and he'd tell me the subtext of what they were saying.

For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.

I think I have always tried to connect my comedy to my art.

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

I don't consider myself a comic but a performer. A comic tells bad jokes.

I've been doing stand-up since '89.

Some people learn comedy, and some people just are comedy.